I'm running Digikam 1.9.0 and KDE 4.5.3 from 64 bit debian-based Mepis

I'm finding that the speed of selecting / importing photos from a camera with a large-ish memory card (i.e. 2+ GB, so not _that_ big) isn't good enough.

So I am looking for ways to speed up the process. It seems especially to be hanging up on getting the EXIF info whilst selecting multiple photos. I don't care about the EXIF info in this situation, so I'm looking for a way to make it ignore that. Can't see anything in the configuration menus.

Any other ideas for speed-up would be welcome. (Except, "upgrade to latest version", since I want to keep with the repository version if possible)